Sunday. Where is jet lag? Is this weak feeling of sleepiness called jet lag? Is it? So I have a jet lag at least twice per week. Each week…

Time to see real Shanghai. We decided to start from the west-most part of touristic Shanghai which is People’s Square and People’s Park. Line 2 of subway brought us here. Fast and convenient, as all of them. And air-conditioned. Over 30 degrees Celsius outside, so we start sightseeing from fountain in front of City Hall.

If one turn back one can see Shanghai Museum:

There is probably a lot to see in Shanghai Museum. If you can devote a month for visiting Shanghai then you should go there. We had only a week. Almost. So we skipped the museum at this time.

People’s Square and Park are surrounded by skyscrapers. This is nothing strange. Unusual sight in Shanghai is clear open space without any tall building up till horizon. Believe me, unusual sight does not exist in Shanghai.

As there will be a lot of higher and more impressive skyscrapers  during our journey we decided not to waste time to admire the ones around People Square and to go on to East Nanjing Road. As intuition says there are two Nanjing Roads in Shanghai: East and, what a surprise, West. West one is normal commercial street, while East one is first in China pedestrian zone. And commercial street as well.

When you reach East Nanjing Road (or Nanjing Xi Lu) you should let the crowd to take you and simply follow it. Any attempt to escape into one of the perpendicular streets would be immediately stopped by a huge mass of scooters which is impossible to pass through.

Chinese merchants are prepared for anything. Let’s assume that you are a member of some radical Christian church, that believes that Christmas in fact should be celebrated in the beginning of September. If you wonder where to find Christmas stuff in September I have a hint:

„There are nine million bicycles in Beijing…” and 20 million Chinese in Shanghai:

More Chinese ads…

Modern „pagoda”:

Suddenly cars are back to the road. This is a sign that we are close to the Bund. Official name is Zhonshan Road and I think that Chinese prefer it as they want not to remember times when buildings that line up the street were build. This was shortly after infamous Nanjing Treaty was signed forcedly opening 6 Chinese cities to westerners and giving away the rule over Hong Kong to Brits. Although the Bund is closer, the below picture shows a panorama of Pudong – a business district.

And here it is: The Bund in rain…

The Bund itself is not too long. It smoothly turns into skyscrapers street. As I said: a usual sight in Shanghai.

The other bank of the river is not less exciting. This is Pudong. I’ve heard a description „Manhattan on steroids”.

Satisfied by the weather (finally sun) we decided to change a little bit surroundings and find the Old Town. Shanghai call its old town Nanshi. So where is Nanshi? We know the approximate azimuth so we turned right, then left, then left again. We ended up in… Just look by yourself.

Although it doesn’t look too encouraging this is the real old Shanghai. The one that disappears under thousand tons of concrete and steel. These days it’s hard to find this kind of sights in places where they was common only few years ago.

If you think that it was dangerous to wander there I have to disappoint you. Even when I felt a little bit unsure, actually it was safe place.

Finally we have reached Nanshi:

It looks like entrance to china town in many western cities. Well, actually it is a China town. My first impression was that the city around me is somehow artificial. I tink that explanation of this feeling was simple: all the buildings around were renovated so they did not look old at all!

The real discovery awaits for tourist away from the main road. As it appeared that was main road that we should have taken. There I realized what „crowded” means.

If you have enough of crowded streets you can line up (of course) into the entrance to Yu Yuan Garden. This is interested place. 5 centuries ago state official bought 2 hectares of land and designed a miniature of the World. The World in this case meant variety of terrain types like mountains, hills, seas, lakes and so on. So there is a lot of small isolated places where man can rest from the noisy world outside. Just like here.

Or here.

Although we felt very relaxed we decided to go back to hotel That was enough as for one day. It took only few minutes to find the nearest metro station. Air-conditioned train gave us relief and brought us to the hotel again.

End of day two.

Spending nine hours in a plane could be boring. I must admit that Finnair solved the issue very well. Their personal entertainment system works almost perfectly. Almost because their movie player tend to leave status bar visible in a way that it interfere with subtitles. I had difficulty watching „Kvinnan som lekte med elden”.

The airplane landed. We had gone to immigration desk and spent one hour in a queue. One and half hour later, after picking up our bags and walking several hundred kilometres through airport we realized that this was huge airport. In fact we were looking for Maglev Train station and we finally found it. This the first place where people from Europe are really surprised by the security measures undertaken by Chinese authorities. Your baggage must pass through security scanner and only after this check one is allowed to come on board.

Take a seat and wait until departure. Doors close. Then you feel delicate move up and weak rocking. All right: rock and roll! It feels alike on the boat. Then the journey starts. You observe speedometer. 80 km/h – nothing special. 160 km/h – top speed of trains in Poland. But wait! It still accelerates. 200 km/h – still below the highest speed I have ever travelled by Arlanda Express with. 250 km/h, my eyebrows starting to raise. 300 km/h – the world outside blinks. 350 km/h – you feel like in plane, but something is wrong because it does not take off! 400 km/h and a sudden but very short thunder. Aha! We just passed by the train crusing in the opposite direction with the same astonishing 400 km/h. Speedometer stops at 431 km/h. You can see on below picture how I looked then (observe speedometer over the passage on right):

Eight minutes later we arrived at Longyang Metro Station where we changed to subway. Just before this we shot commemorative pictures of Maglev Train:

Well metro is much slower than Maglev train, however this is very convenient mean of transportation. We travelled around 12 stations and left the train on Zhongshan Park station. Hotel was just around the corner. We checked in and despite short sleep during the night and approaching jet lag we decided to look around. As first aim we chose Zhongshan Park. Here are some pictures taken in it:

Next picture shows our biggest surprise. Guess who’s there:

Jet lag hit all of us, so we decided to walk around a little bit more and then come back to hotel. We reached the hotel at dusk, however streets were still bright:

That was end of day 1.

So I am in Shanghai, China. 7500 km away from Warsaw. In a different time zone. In a different continent. In a different world.

One tend to locate centre of his world in a place where he lives. This is natural, but this causes distortion in perception of the world. We start to think that the eyes of all the people in the world are directed to our country or continent. We, Europeans tend to think that Europe is centre of the world. Amercians think that United States is the centre of the world, and the rest is holiday or wild countries.

This is totally wrong. People here, live here, so they don’t really care about other parts of the world. That’s normal, but you have to have an opportunity to obeserve it in order to understand it. When you are in Shanghai, then center of the world shifts to Shanghai. You go to the local market, travel by local well developed subway network, consider the quality of water in your local tap, eat in the nearby restaurant which serves delicious dumplings, notice unbelievabely cheap excursion to Angkor Wat (it’s just behind the border!) and then realize that for these people here any particular country or site in the World is just like any other. For them there is nothing more special in Europe than in America. Even more, some countries which are totally exotic for people living in other parts of the world are better known for Chinese becuse they are so close! Think about Korea or Japan. It’s just short jump over the East China Sea!

To exist in the mindset of people in any aprticular place you have to come and present yourself. Then maybe do some business. Sell something and buy something. Maybe some cultural activities.

Here we reach the point of this reflection. As probably you know I am from Poland. This is middle-sized European country, kicked heavily by the history and probably thus locked mentally by it’s history.

We Poles think about Poland as a Messiah of the Nations or Christ of the Nations. We think that everybody in the World cares about what Poland and see how splendid and exeptional Poland is. The truth however is brutal. If you don’t tell people about yourself, you don’t exist! People here doesn’t know much about Poland (in contrary I don’t know much about China, however I really want to change it). Poland does not use potential to promote itself as a modern economy and country of modern culture. Yes, there are some positive signs like Polish pavilion on Expo exhibition, or new Frederic Chopin monument in Zhongshan Park, however this is not it. Chopin lived over 150 years ago. Is this the only exportable cultural good that we have? Pretty old and exploited. Expo pavilion will be removed after Expo, besides it’s not easily accessible, as you have to pay to enter the Expo exibition.

So, who is visible in China? I have flown here by finnish Finnair. In Pudong Airport I could spot Delta from US and British Airways. Then you go to the city, by Germany-made metro trains or Germany-made Maglev train. In the city you can eat American junk food (apart from delicious Chinese food), buy clothes in Spanish or Swedish clothes stores, travel by Swedish, Korean or Japanese buses (and of course Chinese ones), see American, Swedish, Japanese, German or Czech (yes! Skoda is here!) cars, and then you realize that there is no Polish products at all! So how any plain person here can ever get interested on Poland, country that does not produce anything to be spotted by average Chinese?

Yes, we can put another thousand crosses in Warsaw, enthrone Christ as a King of Poland (stupid: Poland is republic, and Christ is not a living human), argue about penalization of in-vitro (no, I am not talking about medieval Europe!) but this means that no one could ever treat us seriously. The faith and religion should be the domain of Churches. Making Poland a modern, competitive, well-known, trusted country should be a prioity of the Parliament in Poland. It’s not.